As I've mentioned elsewhere, the delta is control over login/logout, much easier/low friction deployment of policies, live policy changes, centralized security related logging, additional features like built-in DLP, corporate VPN/proxy, device posture checks, profile encryption, forced update/restart, guaranteed support, etc etc.
You also get the ability to deploy all browser infrastructure on-premise, to effectively decouple yourselves from us and get sync data, telemetry, and so on all stored on-prem, serve updates from your own servers, etc. This is something that wasn't really practical before.
I'm not sure why we would be okay with breaking a browser's trust in that way
I'm not sure what you mean here. If we accept that this is something a lot of Enterprise deployments require, wouldn't you prefer to have things like DLP, VPN and security logging be built-in in the browser, rather than being provided by third-party products that intercept or hook the browser traffic somehow?
Given that the initial market is Europe, where "surveillance of employees" has pretty strong legal limits, the answer to this is actually no! You can still report security relevant information and events of course, within reason.
Of course with AI one could go as far as adding a "Report this site doesn't work in Firefox" button that magically sends a report (+ suggested fix) to the people operating the website/app.
Not sure if you're aware, but this button does actually exist in the help menu, at least for getting a public report filed. I looked through our tracker and didn't find any report similar to yours though (..and Office365 has a ton of webcompat bugs on file...), so I'd recommend you and "others" to actually file those bugs.
Finding and fixing those bugs in websites (unless they're behind a login that you can't easily sign up for) typically isn't the issue, but getting ahold of the site owner sometimes is.
If we can't get ahold of the website operator, or they're slow or unwilling to fix it, we can ship compatibility shims in the browser.
With all due respect, you gotta make that way easier if you want to drive Firefox adoption. Use AI to triage reports, but most people are just going to silently switch to something that works, rather than jump through any hoops.
you don’t need 750 employees to make a browser, and probably can’t effectively use even a hundred
Browser engines are incredibly complicated, yet at the same time are very performance and security sensitive while needing insane backwards compatibility and full multi-platform support. That unfortunately requires large teams, which is why there's only Gecko and WebKit/Blink left.
"Making a browser" you can do with a team of 1 person. Just search & replace the branding in the Chromium source.
My apologies, I didn't read far enough into the release. I thought it was more of a souped-up group policy and deployment support thing by only glancing.
I see all the things I listed are there. "Risk management" was a hand-wavey term meaning "cybersecurity stuff".
Disclaimer, I work for a competitor. Never thought I'd say that to Mozilla people! I wish you good fortune. The space is still relatively new, and not working a SME on the space, it seems there aren't a ton of competitors but some are entrenched.
a) it's much easier to work with b) you have much more monitoring possibilities c) it adds a pile of features d) you can host all supporting services (sync, updates, telemetry, etc) on premise - if you want
